Why Hybrid Cloud Adoption is the Future

Despite the rapid growth of cloud computing, there are many companies (in verticals such as healthcare and manufacturing) that still keep mission critical resources onsite. In a recent survey we conducted, 130 of 146, or 89% of respondents, have SAP onsite. And even when companies do migrate ERP offsite, they tend to opt for hybrid cloud hosting — hosting that mixes on-premise services and private cloud services with the public cloud. Together, all assets are interfaced for maximum affordability and performance. Here’s why hybrid cloud adoption is likely to continue to increase in the coming years.

The Commodity Public Cloud Isn’t Ready for Mission Critical Applications

In the commodity public cloud, compute is cheap, and almost infinitely scalable. However, the commodity cloud uses white box hardware and over-allocates resources, leading to inadequate stability and performance. While a next-generation web-based app may be able to tolerate this, it does not work well for mission critical apps. Additionally, the customer needs to design, deploy and manage their landscape — a task that is prohibitively complex and expensive for most organizations.

Although the enterprise public cloud adds high performance hardware, platform options, workload control, and support, it needs to be carefully tailored to meet customer performance needs. Customers running an SAP HANA® cloud production environment can’t afford the performance degradation of noisy neighbors. The only choices are a managed private cloud and a public enterprise cloud, with exacting SLAs.

Hybrid Cloud Adoption Allows Companies to Run Complex Workloads

According to the RightScale State of the Cloud Report, 55% of enterprises plan on leveraging a hybrid cloud future. Among those already using the cloud, the average runs 6 clouds —1.5 public clouds and 1.7 private clouds running applications, and another 1.5 public clouds and 1.3 private clouds for experimentation.

This is because different workloads benefit from different cloud models. A public cloud might be a perfect fit for, say, a customer-facing front end, but not a great fit for a backend system that requires consistent performance. Additionally the public cloud that offers inconsistent performance may not be right for a particular low latency application.

For example, many mid-market manufacturers need sophisticated ERP, onsite control infrastructure and in some cases, a lot of room for R&D, but don’t have extensive IT resources. A managed cloud for mid-market manufacturers can meet these needs by networking onsite ICS to ERP in a private cloud, and supporting R&D with scalable public cloud resources.

Hybrid cloud adoption also has important compliance applications. For example, PCI requires a computing environment with rigorous physical, logical and networking protections, and many companies simply can’t provide the necessary safeguards onsite. Symmetry’s secure data center services allow our partners to keep PCI data in its own secure server, networked to the rest of their hybrid cloud, reducing compliance risks while containing costs.

Successful Hybrid Cloud Adoption Requires the Right Partner

The hybrid cloud is growing at 71% year over year, and that growth is likely to accelerate. Although the public cloud is tremendously important, there are some workloads it just isn’t well suited for. The right partner can create a best-fit cloud, providing the right combination of flexibility, stability and performance at the right cost.

Contact us to learn how Symmetry can help you get ahead in the hybrid cloud future.

Autumn Salama is the Senior Director of Technical Operations at Symmetry where she is responsible for Symmetry’s Implementations and 24x7 Support Services team. Autumn has been in the data center and cloud infrastructure business for over a decade - managing teams responsible for everything from critical infrastructure operations, service delivery, technical support, marketing and product management. Autumn leverages her diverse experience to provide superior customer service to Symmetry Clients throughout the service delivery and on-boarding process as well front line support outside of business hours.